The duo teamed with Warner Bros. to produce action-comedy “Hot Pursuit,” which stars Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara and opens Friday.

“Second Life” centers on a woman who creates an online persona to find the truth behind her sister’s violent murder — and starts to lose herself in the lies she creates. Jesse Ehrman and Julia Spiro will oversee for the studio.

An adaptation of Watson’s mystery novel “Before I Go to Sleep” was released last year with Nicole Kidman, Mark Strong, Colin Firth and Anne-Marie Duff starring.

Withspoon and Papandea formed Pacific Standard in 2012 in order to fill the vacuum for movies with female protagonists. They produced “Wild,” “Gone Girl” and “Hot Pursuit” and are developing an adaptation of the novel “Big Little Lies,” “The Engagements,” “Pennyroyal’s Princess Boot Camp” and “The Outliers.”

SNL kicks off the final three shows of the season with Scarlett Johansson making her fourth hosting appearance on May 2. Johansson reprises her role as Black Widow in the highly anticipated “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” opening May 1.

Wiz Khalifa will make his SNL debut. “See You Again,” Khalifa’s hit song from the “Furious 7” soundtrack featuring Charlie Puth, currently sits at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. This summer, he will be co-headlining the Boys of Zummer tour with Fall Out Boy.

On May 9, Reese Witherspoon will return to Studio 8H for her second time as host. The Academy Award winner next teams up with Sofia Vergara for the upcoming comedy, “Hot Pursuit, in theaters May 8.

Florence + the Machine takes the stage for the third time as SNL musical guest. The band’s newest album, “How Big How Blue How Beautiful,” will be released in the U.S. on June 2 and features the new singles “What Kind of Man” and “Ship to Wreck.”

Emmy Award winner Louis C.K. will host the SNL season finale on May 16. Louis C.K. returns for his third appearance as host, having received Emmy nominations for his two previous hosting engagements. The fifth season of the critically acclaimed series, “Louie,” is currently airing on FX. His special “Louis C.K. Live at the Comedy Store” is available on Louisck.net and will air on FX May 28.

Rihanna will perform as musical guest for the fifth time. The Grammy Award winning singer starred in this year’s box office animated hit, “Home.” Her newest single, “B**** Better Have My Money,” is currently available for download.

May 2, 2015 • Category: Career •
Comments Off on Reese Witherspoon set to record Harper Lee’s new novel

Reese Witherspoon set to record Harper Lee’s new novel

Harper Lee’s closely guarded second novel, Go Set a Watchman, will have an unexpected early reader: Reese Witherspoon, who is due to record the audio version of the forthcoming book.

UK publisher William Heinemann announced this morning that the Oscar-winning actor would narrate Lee’s unexpected return to the world of fiction. “As a Southerner, it is an honour and a privilege to give voice to the Southern characters who inspired by childhood love of reading, Scout and Atticus Finch,” said Witherspoon, who won the best actress Oscar for the role of June Carter in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. “I am eager for readers to be transported to a pivotal time in American history in the manner that only Harper Lee’s gorgeous prose can deliver,” she told USA Today.

Go Set a Watchman, whose existence was only revealed in February, is one of the most anticipated novels of the year, already selling for less than half price on Amazon.co.uk more than two months before its 14 July release. Set after the events of Lee’s debut, To Kill a Mockingbird, it is said by its publishers to feature an adult Scout returning to the town of her childhood, where she will “grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood”.

Little more is known about the novel, which Lee has said in a statement was discovered by her friend and lawyer Tonja Carter after she set it aside in the 1950s. After reading Go Set a Watchman, her editor advised her to write a story from the perspective of Scout as a child. The resulting novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, went on to win the 1961 Pulitzer prize for fiction, after which Lee fell silent for more than 50 years.

The revelation that a sequel existed set off a host of allegations that the elderly author had been pressurised into publication, but an investigation in Alabama into the situation has since found that claims she was the victim of elder abuse were “unfounded”.

Lionsgate has snapped up the rights to Jessica Knoll’s first novel Luckiest Girl Alive, which Reese Witherspoon and Bruna Papandrea will produce under their Pacific Standard Films banner. The Simon & Schuster tome will be published May 12.

Luckiest Girl Alive centers on Ani FaNelli, a 28-year-old New Yorker who appears to have it all: a sought-after position at a women’s magazine, a killer wardrobe and a dream wedding with her handsome fiancé on the horizon. But behind Ani’s veneer of perfection lies a dark trauma from her past, which resurfaces to unravel her meticulously crafted life.

Knoll has been a senior editor at Cosmopolitan and articles editor at Self. Simon & Schuster’s Sarah Knight, who acquired and edited Luckiest Girl Alive, also acquired Gillian Flynn’s global best-seller Gone Girl and edited her best-seller Dark Places while at Random House. Papandrea served as EP and Witherspoon produced Gone Girl, which was a huge fall hit for 20th Century Fox and became director David Fincher’s highest-grossing film with $167.8M at the domestic box office and $368M worldwide. Pacific Standard Films also was behind the feature adaptation of the best-selling memoir Wild, which earned $52.4M at the global B.O. to date and earned Witherspoon a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the role of fearless hiker Cheryl Strayed and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nom for Laura Dern, who played Cheryl’s mother.

“This is one of those rare books that come along every so often that you simply cannot put down,” Lionsgate Motion Picture Group President Erik Feig said in a statement about Luckiest Girl Alive.

Luckiest Girl Alive is the kind of book that grabs you and doesn’t let go,” added Witherspoon. “The hero of the book is a wily, intelligent, complex narrator. This character and the thrilling narrative that she drives are exactly the kind of story our company, Pacific Standard Films, wants to produce.”

VP Production Jeyun Choi Munford and Creative Exec Nirokhi Raychaudhuri is overseeing the project on behalf of Lionsgate. The deal was negotiated by CAA on behalf of Knoll, the novel and the producers. Paradigm reps Knoll.

Last month, Fox 2000 and Pacific Standard won the book rights auction to Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s book Ashley’s War: The Untold Story Of A Team of Women Soldiers On The Special Ops Battlefield. It follows the creation of a 2010 pilot program by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command that allowed elite female soldiers on the battlefield with Green Berets and Army Rangers in Afghanistan. The unit, CST-2, included 1st Lieutenant Ashley White, who would become the first CST member killed in action.

Update: Fox 2000 has indeed officially closed its deal for the Gayle Tzemach Lemmon book Ashley’s War. The deal was made by UTA, on behalf of lit agent Elyse Cheney. Another opportunity for Reese Witherspoon to craft a film with a heroine that rarely crosses your desk if you sit back and wait for these roles to be dropped in your lap. The role of White would likely be played by a younger actress–she died at 24–but Witherspoon barely flinched when David Fincher didn’t see her for the lead in Gone Girl. They have plenty of time to figure this stuff out.

Original story: Fox 2000 and Pacific Standard’s Reese Witherspoon, Bruna Papandrea and Natalie Krinsky ended last night very close to winning a book rights auction to Ashley’s War: The Untold Story Of A Team of Women Soldiers On The Special Ops Battlefield, a Gayle Tzemach Lemmon book that Harper will publish late next month. It’s the story of the creation by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command of a pilot program that allowed elite women soldiers on the battlefield with Green Berets and Army Rangers in Afghanistan in 2010. The unit, CST-2, brought together a hand-picked group of women from the Army, and that included 1st Lieutenant Ashley White, who would become the first CST member killed in action.

In the wake of American Sniper‘s outsized grosses, this becomes the second female-driven war story in two weeks to make a splashy sale: Warner Bros last week bought the memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning war photographer Lynsey Addario for Steven Spielberg to direct and Jennifer Lawrence to star, in heavy bidding. Ashley’s War didn’t quite reach that feverish level, but I’m told that Sony and Universal were also in the bidding here. Fox 2000 president Elizabeth Gabler guided this one and UTA brokered the deal. Gabler and her exec Marisa Paiva will oversee the project for the studio.

To celebrate our 16 years online, here we are spotlighting 16 of our favourite Reese things from the past 16 years. You will see a new one upon refreshing or changing the page.

"It took me years to be the woman my mother raised. It took me 4 years, 7 months and 3 days to do it, without her. After I lost myself in the wilderness of my grief, I found my own way out of the woods."

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